Mobility of the Future #MOTF18

Hackathon Mobility of the Future #MOTF18

Our first Hackathon experience

For people who don’t know what a Hackathon is, it is a 48 hour marathon of hacking and solving actual and daily problems. In this case the subject was Mobility of the Future. The subject speaks for itself: fixing the mobility problems of today to get a better future. At the Hackathon there were four challenges to solve. We took the challenge to solve the problem around public transport and co-mobility.

Preparation

To be prepared for our first Hackathon experience, we had a Design Thinking session at SAP. Here we learned how to approach a problem differently. Instead of going directly for a solution, you have to focus on the core of the problem and try to understand why it actually is a problem. To unravel this we used a Persona, this is a character, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, in a similar way.

Team spirit

To be successful in 48h, you need a good balanced team. People who are more functional and creative, people who are more technical, pitchers, team leaders, motivators, etc… Most of all a good team spirit is important. We worked as a team untill 5 am in the morning to get things done. We also had fun as a team in beating each other at FIFA and we looked like a team: our company Avelon had foreseen sweaters and shirts to be there and representing a team.

E-COmmute

After a roller-coaster of emotions we finally had a solution called E-COmmute. E-COmmute is a platform that combines existing transportation methods and provides the best and alternative transportation methods to its users. To motivate people to use the application and to use environmental friendly transportation methods, we have created a 'gamification' and 'greenification' function where people can get achievements and rewards.

Technologies

E-Commute is based on the SAP cloud platform with WEB IDE, is implemented with API’s like google maps and is connect with SAP cloud-analytics to analyse real time data.

Leonardo

We have created a persona called Leonardo, Leonardo is an employee at Avelon and does the home-work route every day. At his E-COmmute application he gets notifications that Jason needs to get at the same place for work, so with the app it is easy to connect and carpool. When Leonardo is taken Jason as a passenger, he is helping to reduce the traffic jam and reducing the emissions. For this gesture he will be rewarded with green points and achievements which he can trade for nice rewards.

And the winner is….

In a pitch of seven minutes we had to present our idea and the working functions of the application to a pre jury, who decided which teams would go to the finals. In the finals we had to pitch for the full audience. As a reward of a very intense 48h hackathon we were crowned as winners of the public transport. This was not all! A team member made it also to the finals in the karting race and he finished at a well-deserved third place. We started with no expectations at the hackathon, made it to the finals and won the price of winner of public transport to join the global Y4PT Hackathon in Dubai. So we can conclude that it was a successful Hackathon.